Tag Archives: art show

Light Grey Art Lab, as well as its many other marvellous exhibitions, is currently exhibiting and selling Small Art For A Big Cause, featuring many of their regular artists. You can find the images on their Instagram (always worth following in any event) under #smallartforabigcause or on their website, and framed prints can be ordered from the Light Grey shop.

My piece, Be Bold, was inspired by the heroine of “Mr Fox”, and other fairytale ladies.

“One English village. Two thousand years of stories. Best-selling legends of Australian fantasy Kate Forsyth and Kim Wilkins have teamed up in this collection of 7 incredible stories, all original and never-before published.”

I’ve had the honour of creating the cover art and internal illustrations for this brand new collection by the inimitable Kate Forsyth and Kim Wilkins.

It is currently launching around Australia, with the Brisbane launch next Wednesday 29 November at Avid Reader (free, but bookings essential). That launch will be accompanied by an exhibition of the original cut paper/cyanotype cover (if I can get it to lie flat) and pen-and-ink internal illustrations.

The Sydney launch will be on 30 November at Galaxy Books, launched by Garth Nix (but the only art will be in the books).

This is my contribution to Light Grey Art Lab’s current exhibition “Color Anthropology“. The original is a scratchboard piece, with the colour added digitally.

Many thanks to my patrons, who helped me decide on colour placement when I lost the ability to decide!

There is some stunning art in the exhibition (Lincoln Green, Orange and Saffron are my favourites), which you can check out online if Minneapolis isn’t on your itinerary. The art is also available as prints through the Light Grey shop.Edit: The print is now available on Redbubble: Scarlet.

It is called “Into the Woods”, and is about growing up reading fairytales when you live in the Australian bush. The protagonist of the illustration is far more willowy and on-trend than I ever was when I did this.

I’d been keeping track of dreams out of curiosity, and began to focus on a series of dreams I had which I clearly recognised as anxiety dreams from the last time I was at university: snakes, searches, war, volcanoes. This time, however, everything was always dealt with calmly and ended happily. Also there was a dream about pineapple butterscotch upside-down-cake.

I narrowed the choices down to a dream about taking shelter in a zoo in an office building in a wartorn city. I don’t dream in my own style, and the strongly backlit scene from the dream was a new approach to try.

After a series of tests, I decided to do a pen and ink drawing with digital colour (I kept panicking about getting the yellow wrong, and was submitting the art digitally for this exhibition).

And here is the final piece, The Peaceable Kingdom. You can even try your hand at dream interpretation, if you so desire.